waiting, watching

Today I wanted to develop some film and found a monster sitting on the inner tube of my developing tank. It had wings and it looked rather unfriendly, so I decided to wait with the development until after I felt like dealing with the thing. Yes, I even deal with spiders myself, but things with too many legs spook me, so it might just take a moment or two until I get over the initial aversion. So, instead of developing I pointlessly spooled a couple more rolls of XP2 and stared out into the rain. It’s the rainy season again and since I don’t really like shooting in the rain, I almost immediately get impatient with this kind of weather. And it’s not as if I wasn’t impatient enough already waiting to finally get my hands on my Leica!

In the end I got so impatient with being cooped up in the house and with waiting around for the winged monster to fly away by itself that I decided to embark on a far more masochistic mission than just getting rid of an insect: I actually installed VueScan and tried to figure out how to make raw scans and to invert them with ColorPerfect. I have been unhappy with Silverfast for a while and I always feel like I don’t get enough control when it comes to difficult negatives. Well, the VueScan + ColorPerfect option goes into the completely opposite direction and it’s rather overwhelming with way too many options! It took me quite some time to figure out how it works, but in the end I think I got some decent results from a difficult roll where I was a bit all over the place with my exposures. It was the first time I had used my Zorki after buying the Olympus XA in summer and every now and then I think I forgot to change the aperture. A lot of the shots came out underexposed. That’s what shooting an automatic camera can do to you! With Silverfast a couple of these pictures were really just too underexposed to be salvageable. Especially in the shadows they became really ugly. With the VueScan + ColorPerfect combination I managed to get much better results by using the multi-exposure function that got a little more shadow detail out of the negative. I think the Pro version of Silverfast also has that option, but after dealing with their support one too many times I decided not to spend any more money on them.

The only problem I see with VueScan is that it’s way too slow a process. After all I spent the whole afternoon with scanning and only managed to get through barely a third of the roll. For everyday situations multiple passes with slower scanning speed just add up to too much time, and I also have to keep in mind that the adjustment in ColorPerfect also takes time. I will therefore only use VueScan in specific situations where I need more control – for printing or with negatives that can’t be salvaged in Silverfast and probably also for colour negatives, since this is the main purpose of ColorPerfect.

Tomorrow there will be more to come from this roll.

All pictures taken with: Zorki 4K and Jupiter 12 35mm f/2.0.
Rollei RPX 400 stand-developed in Caffenol-CL, 60min.

© Lilly Schwartz 2014

© Lilly Schwartz 2014

He was just standing there staring.

© Lilly Schwartz 2014

© Lilly Schwartz 2014

© Lilly Schwartz 2014

© Lilly Schwartz 2014

© Lilly Schwartz 2014

© Lilly Schwartz 2014

Dark shadows, strong highlights. Silverfast could have only dealt with the highlights.

© Lilly Schwartz 2014

© Lilly Schwartz 2014

again, the shadows look much better here.

© Lilly Schwartz 2014

© Lilly Schwartz 2014

This one wasn’t salvageable at all in Silverfast because the blocked up shadows had too much noise. Much more smooth with VueScan and the multi-exposure function.

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